Managing and structuring your salesforce for optimum performance can be challenge. There are many elements that need to be carefully consider in salesforce design.
Below are five of the most common mistakes that we see company’s make in designing your salesforce.
1. Salesforce Role pollution.
When salespeople are involved in customer service and support work, they’re not selling. Yet too often, salespeople spend too much time on activities that are not core to selling. Examples of these activities include chasing down information for customers, implementing installations or addressing technical issues.
While these activities are critical, the reality is that the company can and should have other, more appropriate resources to address these issues.
2. The Salesforce chasing limited opportunities.
Many field salespeople spend too much time on customers that have limited sales potential. Often salespeople lack insight into the addressable opportunity at the customer level, but even with good information, they may gravitate toward smaller customers for a variety of reasons. Poor opportunity qualification and a poor understanding of the ideal customer profile can be two reasons for this.
Empowering an inside sales team can provide much more cost-effective coverage of smaller customers and prospects. This in turn allows field sales personnel to focus on more valuable opportunities.
3. Fragmented key account management.
When a company is undisciplined in its key account management approach, it is essentially walking away from growth opportunities with its most valuable customers. This relates to understanding the true ‘customer lifetime value’ that your customers can realise. One issue might be trying to treat too many customers as key or strategic, resulting in inflated cost of sales or diluted impact, as expensive strategic programs and resources are spread too thin or misdirected.
4. Flawed Salesforce decision making.
Companies can leverage a wealth of data and sophisticated analytical techniques to optimize sales resource decisions. However many rely on intuition or simplistic financial ratios that ignore critical information. Such approaches generally fail to assess and consider sales potential at the account level or the effort required to execute the sales process for different customer segments.
CRM software is key in providing real-time reporting and insight into your business. This insight provides the business leaders with the information needed to make educated business decisions.
5. Poorly designed Salesforce territories.
The amount of work needed to cover target customers and prospects in a territory is often far more than one salesperson can accomplish. While it may look like these customers are covered on paper, they are not really covered appropriately, resulting in poor penetration, untapped customer opportunities and lost growth.
Getting sales force design right is complex and while critical, it may not by itself be sufficient to drive organic growth.
How a CRM can help with salesforce design
A CRM system benefits an organisation through the visibility of its sales activities. This visibility is fundamental to managing sales performance and control of the sales process. This visibility enables management to understand why, when, who and how opportunities are being won, stalled, or being lost. If it cannot be monitored, it cannot be managed. The visibility offered within the CRM system also allows management to make educated business decisions based on hard data. A CRM system will enable structured data to be used to access performance. This assessment should indicate which sales person is out performing others.
How ProAptivity can help with Salesforce design
ProAptivity are an independent CRM solutions provider with over 30 years experience in helping clients successfully onboard user-customisable CRM solutions. We focus on the implementation, training, and support of highly customised CRM software solutions. Our CRM software supported by our training provide customers with the tools needed to deliver successful business process management.
Fundamentally, we help organisations embed CRM best practice throughout their organisation. This helps organisations become more competitive, customer focused and ultimately more profitable. If you need help in understanding why my business needs CRM, maybe some of our video’s or eBooks could help! Alternatively visit Maximizer CRM for more information. You can contact us today on 0330 223 6362 or via email at info@proaptivity.com. Contact us today for a free CRM consultation that will assess if your business is CRM ready.
